Methods and systems for controlling energy supply to a client, wherein a demand request signal is provided by an energy utility or energy grid are known from prior art. Within such known technologies energy utilities or energy grids request a reduction of energy to be provided within definable time periods, for example, for avoiding situations wherein the energy utility or energy grid is not able to provide a sufficient amount of energy.
Typically, Demand-Response, DR, technologies are one of the measures increasingly deployed to serve the challenges of future energy landscape. Today, DR is mainly applied to electricity grids. The coexistence of multiple energy grids and demands are mainly exploited passively, but not through active coordination of the given multi-modality linked to the grids. Research is ongoing in exploiting the transition between different utility grids through actual transition of energy forms.
The participation of consumers like buildings in DR programs have been so far limited, and only related to electricity grid DR approaches. In this context, the aggregation of buildings to building fleets have been considered but not widely deployed. New developments on electrical energy storage solutions, ESS,—in form of battery-ESS—allow the deployment of ESS into buildings. While this is technologically possible, e.g. http://advmicrogrid.com/#hybridelectricbuildings, this approach is still very costly and ignores the need for energy landscape evolution beyond the electricity grid.
But, it is common that buildings are connected to multiple energy and utility grids for different resources. In particular in cases where buildings can heat with multiple forms of energy, e.g. reducing gas consumption for static heating would have effects on electric air heating systems' energy consumption. It is also known that the heating/cooling effort for buildings takes a large portion of the energy consumption distribution—about 54%, source: http://www.iluvtrees.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/iltofficebuildingprofile.pdf—compiled by a mixture of electricity about 66% of entire buildings and other sources like natural gas.
Hybrid energy systems are mainly deployed as single solutions, and operated to serve given demand profiles, e.g. Combined-Heat-Power, CHP, and thermal storages, TSS. Subsequently dependent systems are not considered in the operational control. However, the extended operational potential with hybrid energy grids asks for flexibility in grid control in both utilities, operated/optimized grid-specific as well as synchronized on hybrid grid operation scale.